Is this a good build for the office?

[EvanK]

Hi folks,

Looking for some insight into whether or not the pre-built machine I have picked out will be good for my needs, and whether it's being offered at a good price.

I'm in need of a new work computer to replace my 10 year old tower which I inherited from the person who previously held my position, and I've been told that I have up to $1,300 CAD to spend on a new tower and monitor(s). While I'd love to build my own machine, I'm not sure how much luck I'd have getting the parts reimbursed through my payroll department, and would also like something I can purchase a multi-year warranty for so that if I leave my position/change offices in a couple years from now, my successor will be able to get basic support without too much of a hassle (we don't have an IT guy readily available to fix things or swap-out parts as it's a smaller office).

I'm looking for a machine that can handle the standard Microsoft Office suite and a dozen Chrome tabs at once on a daily basis, but will also be able to run Photoshop, InDesign, and Premiere in the background a couple times per week without any hiccups. No gaming, but I'd like it to be able to have the ability to push two 4k monitors in the future without breaking a sweat, so I'm not sure whether I'd need to have a dedicated GPU or not.

I'm looking at grabbing his pre-built model from the Canadian store Memory Express for $740 CAD (~$515 USD) with a Ryzen 5 3400G, 500GB SSD, and 16GB RAM:

https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX80604

I may end up grabbing a 2TB WD Black drive to supplement it as well for media storage. A couple things about the build concern me, though: they seem to be using a relatively cheap and low-power PSU, a generic no-name SSD with what I would consider questionable longevity, and no dedicated GPU.

Does anyone have any thoughts about whether this seems to be a reasonable price, a well-built machine, and if it would be suitable for my needs? Would you suggest looking elsewhere or choosing a different build? Also, if anyone has experience buying pre-built machines from Memory Express, I'd appreciate any insight into their customer service and build quality. Happy to take monitor suggestions as well

TL;DR: is this a good build for word processing, web browsing, and basic Adobe CC work? Any red flags, or other suggestions?

Thanks!

 

[ssal]

Microsoft Office = not hardware demanding at all.
A dozen of Chrome = Chrome is a memory hoard. You'll need more DRAM the more tabs you keep open.
Adobe Premiere = You need a fast CPU, a decent dedicated GPU and 32 gb of ram if not more.

If you're doing 4K video, a NVME SSD would help because video edit does a lot of I/O.

US$1,000 is very tight for what you want when you account for a 24" monitor.

 

[EvanK]

Thanks for the reply!

Adobe Premiere = You need a fast CPU, a decent dedicated GPU and 32 gb of ram if not more.

How much GPU acceleration does Premiere use these days? The last time I built a PC was about 6 years ago, and I didn't even bother putting in a GPU until a few months down the line as GPU acceleration in Adobe products was so limited at the time. If I'm not doing any particularly intense editing, could I get away without a GPU?

 

[ssal]

Thanks for the reply!



How much GPU acceleration does Premiere use these days? The last time I built a PC was about 6 years ago, and I didn't even bother putting in a GPU until a few months down the line as GPU acceleration in Adobe products was so limited at the time. If I'm not doing any particularly intense editing, could I get away without a GPU?

To my understanding, Adobe doesn't utilize GPU as extensively like Davinci Resolve. During editing, the play and scrub hardly trigger the GPU.

In encoding, my CPU (Ryzen 7-2700x) is 100% while GPU (GTX-1060 6gb) is around 65-75%. Encoding is not a problem for me. For 1080, it averages around 40 sec per 1 min of video. For 4K, it is around 1m12sec per min. Plenty fast, considering most of my video is under 5 minutes.